The Northern Lights Pinball is pinball's public face in a world of home gaming dominated by consoles and big budget product promotions. It's one of the few pinball events aimed at a very different demographic of mainly non-pinball-people, and thus provides the opportunity to introduce a whole new audience to the game.

The pinball element is but a small part of the huge Play Expo show (previously called Replay Expo, and before that just Replay). After two years at the Norbreck Castle hotel in Blackpool, the show moved to the much larger Event City in Manchester for 2012.

Event City in Manchester

In case it's not obvious from the picture above, Event City is huge. Here's a view from one end of the hall looking towards the entrance.

Inside Event City

The Northern Lights Pinball set-up consisted of nearly 80 machines and was located on the far right of the picture above, near the building's front right corner.

The pinballs were about here, but on the far side of the grey dividing wall

Set up took place on Friday with the last few machines arriving on Saturday morning, just before the organisers closed the loading bay doors.

The pinballs during the set-up period on Friday night

Mousin' Around is made ready for the show

As is Magic City

One of the more unusual pinballs was Poibug's Haunted House which had been modified to add a multiball feature to the usual single-ball play and also has speech. We'll have full details of this machine and the work it took to modify it in an upcoming Pinball News article.

It sat next to an regular Haunted House for comparison.

Poibug sets up his modified Haunted House

Simon, Dave, Garry and Alan during Friday night's set-up

Before we continue with the pinballs, let's have a quick look around the Play Expo show to see who else was setting up their stands.

Looking down the hall, EA have a big stand on the left with Nintendo in the centre.
Crews worked through the night to build them.

Halo 4 was being promoted with 12 back-to-back Xbox 360 stations

The dozen Halo 4 stations above were far from the only Xbox 360 consoles at the show. We reckon there were about 56 more in the row shown below, while another similar row was being built behind.

Many more Xbox 360 stations

The original Xbox was here too

If all these modern games were too complicated, there were plenty of simpler alternatives.

There were older consoles to play

Home computing wasn't forgotten either

A collection of arcade video games brought by the JAMMA+ group sat next to the pinballs in 'coin-op corner'.

JAMMA+ arcade video games together with the Northern Lights pinballs

The show opened to the public on Saturday morning and long before the scheduled opening there were huge queues building up. These were exacerbated by a delay in opening the doors but demonstrated the number of visitors who came the show.

The crowd waiting to get in to Play Expo

The picture above is actually just the end of the queue which ran the length of the building, down to the end of the car park and back again...

The queue to get in

...and then continued along the front of the Event City building.

More of the queue

The doors did eventually open around an hour later than planned, with some visitors waiting nearly two hours just to get in.

The first visitors are admitted into the hall

Visitors soon started spreading through the hall, occupying the many playing seats

It didn't take long before every seat in front of every screen was filled.

The Xbox row with every seat taken

It didn't take long for all the pinballs to be in use either.

Visitors enjoying the pinballs

Theatre of Magic gets some special attention

Although the machines were in use nearly all the time,
it didn't take long to get on a machine

More machines with avid players

Winning is all in the mind...

...unless you have mystical powers, of course

The full list of the 78 games available to play is:

Attack from Mars

Aerobatics

Banzai Run

Batman Forever

Black Knight

Black Knight 2000

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Capt. Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy

Congo

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Cyclone

Demolition Man

Demolition Man

Dr Dude

El Toro

F-14 Tomcat

Family Guy

Fish Tales

Funhouse

Haunted House

Haunted House

High Roller Casino

High Speed 2 - The Getaway

High Speed 2 - The Getaway

Hurricane

Indiana Jones

Indianapolis 500

Indianapolis 500

Indianapolis 500

Iron Man

Jackbot

Joker Poker

Jokerz!

Judge Dredd

Judge Dredd

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park

Magic City*

Miss-O

Monster Bash

Mousin' Around

NBA Fastbreak

NBA Fastbreak

NBA Fastbreak

No Fear

No Fear

No Good Gofers

Operation Thunder

Party Zone

Pinbot*

Roadshow

Rocky & Bullwinkle

Shrek

Spider-Man

Spirit

Star Trek - The Next Generation

Star Trek - The Next Generation

Star Trek - The Next Generation

Street Fighter 2

Tales of the Arabian Nights

The Addams Family

The Addams Family

The Bally Game Show

The Flintstones

The Machine - Bride of Pinbot

The Shadow

The Shadow*

Theatre of Magic

Transformers Pro

Twilight Zone

Volcano*

Whitewater*

Whodunnit?

World Cup Soccer

World Cup Soccer

World Cup Soccer

X-Men Pro

* Not working or switched off when we made our list

Every machine being enjoyed

For those looking for pinball parts, Dave Willcox's Pinball Daze had a stand selling a range of essentials, second-hand spares and manuals.

The Pinball Daze stand

David Robinson was also demonstrating his DMD Extender which uses a Raspberry Pi mini-computer to intercept the dot matrix data, convert it to video and output it as HDMI. Here it was fitted to a High Speed 2 - The Getaway machine, but it should work with any regular-size DMD and would be great for tournament finals when used in conjunction with an overhead camera.

David's DMD Extender

You can take a look around the Northern Lights Pinball and the whole Play Expo show in our exclusive Six Minute Tour video.

The Six Minute Tour of Play Expo 2012

There were also some competitive events at the show. The main one was the NBA Challenge sponsored by Pinball Mania which has made appearances at several UK shows and features two linked NBA Fastbreak machines.

The NBA Fastbreaks used for the NBA Challenge

Entry cost £7.50 and each player was allocated one of thirty teams - which were split into six leagues, although not the same as the six divisions in the current NBA conferences - and given a play time.

The play schedule

At their allocated time, each group of five competitors assembled and played pairs of matches such that every player played every other player once in a head-to-head linked game. The choice of machine was decided by the toss of a coin.

The winner from each group went through to the play-offs. In the case of a tie in the number of games won,the difference between points scored and points against decided the winner. They were joined by the top two other players - based on the number of wins and the points difference - to give a quarter-final of eight players.

The referees watch as the match begins

Peter Scheldt takes on Shaun Harvey

The winners from each group were:

Adam Sharples

Adrian Donati

Martin Ayub

Andy Foster

Malcolm Lashley

Kate Morris

The two highest scoring second place players were James Watson and Dan Hardy who completed the eight who played in the quarter final.

That round said goodbye to Adam, Malcolm, Kate and Dan, which left the two semi final matches of Martin vs Adrian and Andy vs James. Adrian and James won their matches to go into the final.

James plays Adrian in the final

In an incredibly close final, James narrowly edged ahead in the final stages to seal the victory by 106 points to 101.

Adrian loses by a whisker, as James celebrates victory

In the play-off for third place, Andy beat Martin by 108 points to 88.

NBA Challenge winner, James Watson

Second place, Adrian Donati

Third place, Andy Foster

Andy also won the adult High Score Competition which was held on Iron Man. There was a kids High Score Competition too held on the adjacent Shrek machine which was won by Leo Marshall. Both competitions were sponsored by Pinball Heaven.

The High Score Competition machines

There were lots more prizes to be won in the tombola and the prize raffle. The tombola cost £1 ($1.60, €1.25) for 3 tickets or £5 ($8, €6.25) for 20 tickets. Any number drawn ending in a 5 won a prize.

The tombola desk

Some of the tombola prizes

More tombola prizes

There was also a raffle where tickets cost £1 ($1.60, €1.25) per strip of 5 tickets, or 6 strips for £5.

All the money raised from the raffle, the tombola, the donated prizes which were auctioned on Ebay to raise funds and any cash donations went to the Teenage Cancer Trust which is the Northern Lights Pinball's chosen charity.

There were also prize draws for those who helped with the Northern Lights Pinball event by bringing games. The winners and their prizes were:

Jim Askey

-

The Wizard of Oz translite

Andy Foster

-

Transformers translite

Eric Ridley

-

Cliffy's rubbers pack

Last year the Northern Lights Pinball team raised £401 for the Teenage Cancer Trust. This year, when all the games had been packed away and returned home, and the counting of the cash could take place, the total raised from the show and the Northern Lights Just Giving donations page leaped up to £2,400 ($3,840/€3,000).

Plans for next year's Play Expo and Northern Lights Pinball have yet to be announced, but the whole event proved to be a big success this year.

The 'Thank You' banner at the NLP desk

As large as the show was though, the venue could easily cope with a something twice the size. With the Play Expo organisers looking to expand the show further, next year's could be even bigger and better.